Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed weekly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material.
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Monday, September 23, 2013

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

THE ONE TRUE GOOD WAR

Allow me to
take you by the hand and lead you on a mild excursion I recently undertook.

It was a
Sunday afternoon, with rather indifferent Auckland weather, now rain, now
shine, as is the way with this temperamental isthmus in early spring.

I had been
indoors too long and was feeling stale and irritable, probably the result of
reading all these damned books that I cover on this blog. I needed fresh air
and exercise. So I hopped in the car and drove to Takapuna Beach, meaning to
stride vigorously up and down it for about forty minutes. But as soon as I
arrived at my destination and got out of my car, the gentle Irish mist turned
into light spitting rain, and then the light spitting rain turned into a hard
driving downpour.

I hastily
changed plan, and sought shelter in the Takapuna Library, which I visit very
infrequently.

The old
horrors returned, of course. I consider myself a reasonably well-read person.
But in the fiction section was shelf after shelf of authors, in shiny new
jackets, of whom I had never heard. This set off those familiar gloomy thoughts
on how impossible it is to keep up with everything that’s published – and how
redundant much that is published probably is anyway. Not sour grapes, my
friend. Experience.

So I turned
to the non-fiction sections, wondering why so many flashy self-help books had
infiltrated what would once have been the soberest section of the library. The
Science parts looked interesting, but scant. There was a reasonable amount of
Sociology, much of it on wimmin’s themes. But it was the History section that
really gave me pause, and induced me to write this little memoir.

There were
some volumes of New Zealand history with an emphasis on colonial wars and Maori
issues. There were a few general histories of European, American and Asian
countries. There were quite a few books on ancient wars and nineteenth century
wars (Napoleon, the American Civil War etc.) and a respectable number on the
First World War, with an emphasis on Gallipoli and Passchendaele and the
Anzacs. At times it seemed that the words “history” and “war” were regarded as
synonymous. But, at a very rough and approximate estimate, I would say that
fully half the books in the History section had to do with the Second
World War. All aspects of that war – Nazis and death camps; the European war;
D-day and the Russian front; the War in the Pacific; commando raids and bombing
raids; occupied France; collaborators and resistance movements; The Home Front;
experiences of prisoners of war etc. etc. etc.

Librarians
do regularly check on what books are most often borrowed; do relegate unread
books to the stacks or biff them out in cut-price sales; and do ensure that what
is on the shelves – apart from the [very] few “classics” and the indispensible
reference books – follows a rough sort of market demand. So I do not for one
moment believe this dominance of the Second World War in the History section
was the result of some malign plot. It simply meant that there is a steady
demand for books on the Second World War. Yes – there is a lesser interest in
the First World War, and doubtless it will spike next year when we begin
commemorating that war’s centenary. But to all intents and purposes the Second
World War remains king.

Of course
this phenomenon is not confined to just one Auckland branch library. It is
fairly universal in our public libraries. Old codgers come to get books that
will help them re-fight Crete or the Battle of Britain or their dad’s time as a
coast-watcher in Oz. Teenage boys get books that let them ogle Nazi uniforms
and believe the heroic stories about the Dam Buster raid and pretend they are
researching an important history assignment for school. Women want to see what
their auntie was doing as a nurse during the war and how their grandpa survived
Stalag Something.

To extend
the evidence, this phenomenon isn’t a uniquely New Zealand one. Some years ago,
and for a relatively short time (about six months) I subscribed to a TV pay
channel which purveys fictions loosely based on history. It is called the
History Channel. In my first week as a subscriber, I thought that some
important event in the Second World War was being commemorated that week. Every
second programme on the channel was about US Marines at Guadalcanal or how the
atom bomb was made or what exactly was the armament and payload capacity of the
B17 or a “now it can be told” tale of a “secret” raid on Nazi Germany. The
trouble was, I found the same sort of programming in my second and third and
fourth weeks as a subscriber to the History Channel until it clicked that this
was the channel’s standard fare. Like the History section of an Auckland branch
library, “history” on the History Channel meant the Second World War with guest
appearances by a few other things.

All of
which brings me to this overwhelming question; why is there such a popular
fixation on the Second World War?

In the 68
years since 1945, wars have been fought and atrocities have been perpetrated
which, collectively, have destroyed as much of humanity as the Second World War
did. (Count your way through Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan, colonial
struggles in Africa and Asia, civil wars in many parts of the world, and mighty
bust-ups in eastern and south-eastern Europe as the old Soviet Empire
collapsed.) But - rivalled only by the Taiping Rebellion - no other single war
destroyed as many people as the Second World War did. This may be part of its
ongoing fascination. There is a clear “before” and “after” in history, with the
Second World War as the divider.

But I can
think of a more compelling reason for the Second World War’s enduring
popularity.

Unless we have not yet got past
propaganda concepts generated when that war was being fought, we now know that
the Second World War was filled with ambiguities and dark areas that do not
reflect well on anybody. I do not mean the Nazis’ attempted genocide, or
Japanese atrocities, about which we have always been informed. I mean
ambiguities and grubbiness related to the winning side, which have been
revealed only piecemeal in the intervening years.

There is, for example, the
awkward historical fact that to defeat one rapacious and genocidal totalitarian
power (Nazi Germany), the services of another rapacious and genocidal
totalitarian power (the Soviet Union) were required. And the largest and most
significant defeats of Nazi Germany took place on the Eastern Front, where
opposing armless were equally ruthless in their methods. The war was not a
simple game of goodies and baddies.

There is the fact that kamikaze
pilots and the Japanese will to defend their homeland were, in the end,
countered by history’s sole use of nuclear weapons. And there were the dubious
deals that carved up countries and spheres of influence in the east after the
war was over, basically betraying people like Poles and Czechs who had tried to
resist Nazi aggression. And there were nasty things like the bombing of Dresden
and the frying of non-combatants in the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Tokyo. At
least one of the Allies (France) tried to reassert its mastery of a colonial
empire once the war was over; while another (Britain) was also very reluctant
to let its empire go. Hardly good publicity for the values of democracy, which
the Allies were supposedly upholding.

Yet in spite of all this, we can
still see the Second World War as a “good thing” – a war justified by the need
to defeat things that were universally recognised as wrong. This, I believe, is
its real trump card as the popular war that still dominates the History
sections of libraries. You can make up all sorts of pacifist fables if you are
dealing with the First World War, with its meat-grinder slaughter of soldiers
for no purpose that is easily discernible from our point in history. But
(despite the odd effort to do so), it is much harder to write pacifist fables
about the Second World War because it still seems to most people that defeating
Hitler was worth doing. Using the old “just war” morality, it was the most just
of wars.

So it still defines what History
is for browsers in libraries, as I found on a rainy day in Takapuna. The Second
World War is the archetypal Good War.

CODA: A few weeks
after this soggy day in sight of Rangitoto, one of my three teenage daughters
decided she wanted to revive a family custom by having us all watch a movie
together one Friday evening. I pointed to the living room’s untidy pile of DVDs
and told her to choose one. She chose Noel Coward’s 1943 flag-waver about the
Royal Navy, In Which We Serve. So the
five of us sat down and watched it.

Sometimes the girls laughed at
Noel Coward’s rapid-fire clipped delivery of lines. Sometimes the class
stereotypes (frightfully proper middle class officer with country home and
servants; cheerful, cheeky working-class sailors and their women) were too much
for us. But as the movie progressed, I kept taking surreptitious looks to see
how the girls were coping with it – and most times I saw nothing but absorption
and delight in the domestic scenes of husbands and wives (Noel Coward and Celia
Johnson; Bernard Miles and Joyce Carey; John Mills and Kay Walsh) and
admiration in the naval scenes where the ship gets blown up and the men cling
to a life-raft. We could easily pick the scenes that would have had British
audiences weeping when the film was first shown – the Christmas dinner scene
where Celia Johnson gives a speech on how sailors love their ships; the scene
where John Mills breaks to Bernard Miles the news that his wife has been killed
in an air raid. They still play well.

And then, just before the closing
credits, laughter returned when the patriotic music blared and a commentary
trumpeted the virtues of the Royal Navy for “our island race” over montages of
ships and naval parades. The crudity of the appeal was too much for us, let
alone our teenage daughters.

So what am I saying here? Of
course we could see that it was wartime propaganda and play-acting. The cynic
in me is aware that neither Noel Coward nor “Dickie” Mountbatten (upon whom
Coward’s character in the film is based) were as interested in the opposite sex
as they were in handsome young sailors. There are huge elements of falsity in
the film, and it rigidly supports the class system with its capable upper crust
officers and its lower class other ranks who badly need to be led.

Yet in spite of all this, we
could still watch it with affection and some degree of admiration. After all,
flaws and all, it was about people fighting in a good cause against something
that had to be stopped.

You see, the sense of the Second
World War as a justifiable war had invaded my living room, and coloured the way
my family and I watched a wartime film.